JOHN BUELL and DAVID WAGNER

The Poverty of American Politics

Bill Clinton's late summer tour of impoverished communities has
become another occasion for public debate about poverty in America.
The related themes of poverty and economic opportunity promise to be
a major staple of the 2000 elections. Our political leaders
periodically rediscover poverty when elections approach, but the
United States is a difficult nation in which to be poor.

Puritan New Englanders took wealth as a sign of God's favor. By
the 19th century our culture was dominated by the Horatio Alger
mystique of rags to riches. The converse of these celebratory ideals
lay in the widespread conviction that the poor deserved their fate.
Conservatives were willing to leave them to that fate. Corporate and
liberal philanthropy offered occasional alms -- accompanied by
intrusive moral guidance. Only during the Great Depression, when
poverty gripped wide segments of the middle and working classes, were
these easy moral certainties widely challenged.

But American politicians are also masters of the symbol. They
deflect criticism by stealth, always appearing as they are not.
President Bill ("end welfare as we know it") Clinton's starts the
election season with visits to a number of sites, from an
impoverished Indian reservation to an inner city ghetto to an
Appalachian town. He proclaims himself "against" poverty. In a
parroting of Republican nostrums, Clinton brings to the poor areas
urban enterprise zones e.g. assistance to the private business
sector.

The vice president, ever anxious to get in on the thunder, goes to
Texas to chide his possible presidential opponent for allowing
children to be educated in trailers. Not to be outdone, Governor Bush
responds with a political strategy of ''going where Republicans
usually don't go,'' as he puts it. He visits Mexican-American
enclaves in inner cities. All of this amounts to lots of trips to
areas once neglected, but all except the most naive must wonder
"where's the beef?" in this posturing.

On the programmatic level, clearly the days of New Deal liberalism
are over. Bill Clinton the campaigner is the same president who has
actually been on the front lines at creating poverty. His celebrated
program to end the AFDC program, and state actions against welfare
recipients, is already increasing the ranks of the homeless
throughout the nation. The consequences are likely to be increasingly
visible as the years go on and poor people exhaust their "lifetime"
benefits. His continued championing of the discredited war on drugs
and crime is not only, as one author puts it, a "search and destroy"
mission against the African-American males, but, with over 5 million
low-income people a year put in jail, prison or probation, a policy
that promotes and sustains poverty. And with his championing of free
trade from NAFTA to GATT, the economic recovery of the '90s has been
among the weakest of our post World War II expansions. Economist Doug
Henwood reports that during this upswing, increases in real
investment, productivity, and wages have been "mediocre at best."
Only in the last 18 months have real wages surpassed the high they
reached in the previous expansion.

It's true that right now we are in a so called "boom" economy. So
for many, the question is how can we have hunger, homelessness, and
poverty when job growth is booming? And the widely prevalent answer
is once again that the poor are in some ways to blame: They will not
work or take drugs or use resources to buy alcohol or junk food.

A reexamination of the current boom and of the extent of hunger
might lead us to different conclusions. If hunger is a consequence of
intrinsic character flaws, one must wonder why its incidence
fluctuates so severely both year to year and by region. If character
were to blame, one would expect hunger to diminish when individuals
faced the stick of welfare "reform" and the carrot of an expanding
job market. Yet James Weil, head of Food Research and Action Center,
reports that hunger rose sharply in 1998 and that "36 million
Americans were either hungry, were skipping meals, couldn't afford an
adequate or balanced diet, or were otherwise on the edge of
hunger.''

The vast majority of the poor are working poor. In one of the
first state-level studies of welfare "reform" Stephanie Seguino and
Sandy Butler established that a majority of the poor in Maine hold
full or part time work, with about a quarter holding multiple jobs. A
national study by Rutgers University's Center for Workforce
Development indicated that only 24 percent of the working poor wanted
to work less, compared with 58 percent of other workers from earlier
Rutgers studies. Conversely, 24 percent of the working poor said they
wanted to work more, compared with 12 percent of other workers. In
addition, contrary to many prevalent stereotypes, a study done in
1993 by Mathematica Policy Research concluded that food stamp
recipients shop smarter and eat 20 to 50 percent less junk food than
other people.

If the poor are willing to work, husband their resources wisely,
and often work harder than many others, so too are they willing to
learn. But our corporate political economy fails them in this way as
well. The Rutgers study found that 81 percent of the working poor
wanted to enroll in an education or training program but only 18
percent work for employers who give financial help for off-site job
training or education (compared with 36 percent of higher-income
workers). Only 27 percent received government aid for that
purpose.

Corporate unwillingness to fund job training and development is
not surprising given a U.S. corporate culture that emphasizes
short-term profits and often fails to make the best use of the
existing talents of workers at all levels. Unfortunately, the
Clinton/Gore Administration's current notions of "enterprise zones"
are only likely to feed the worst aspects of this corporate culture.
Most enterprise zone proposals offer a relaxation in occupational or
environmental laws and/or reductions in specific business taxes in
return for investment in depressed areas. Relaxation of important
business regulations punishes firms that strive to maintain best
practices and can encourage political pressure to water down national
standards. Ultimately, the costs in polluted environments and damaged
workers must be borne by the affected communities or even the
taxpayer.

Tax favors may seem a more benign way to advance the interests of
depressed areas. Nonetheless, as Chris Tilly, Professor of Regional
Economic and Social Development at the University of
Massachusetts-Lowell, points out, most such proposals have
significant flaws. The proposals generally entail relocation to the
impoverished area but do not require that employees be hired from
that area. Tilly points out that "given American commuting patterns,
it is possible for a business to locate in the inner city but hire
its entire staff from outside, which defeats the stated purpose of an
enterprise zone." Tilly also points out that "The time-limited nature
of enterprise zone incentives means that businesses may temporarily
locate in low income areas, benefit from the subsidies or tax breaks,
and then leave. U.S. inner cities are littered with closed businesses
where this happened."

Enterprise zones, like most forms of government tax favors or
contracts with U.S. corporations more generally, ask no quid pro
quo of the recipients. Businesses can pay low wages, provide
minimal levels of training, and offer their employees no benefits or
long term equity stake in the firm. Although such workplace practices
generally are counterproductive in the long run, they often do yield
short-term profit gains.

As a consequence of short-term corporate thinking and
corporate-oriented trade treaties, workers have suffered throughout
much of the current "boom." The stagnation in worker pay and
productivity that has characterized all but the last 18 months
accounts for both much of the hunger among low-income workers and
many of the stereotypes and resentments held by those just above them
in the corporate pyramid.

Many of America's industrial and white-collar workers are now
working the longest hours of their lives. Their jobs are tedious and
unstimulating. They have faced stagnant or even declining real
incomes during much of their working lives. Their hold on the
American dream of a stable and secure family life has become tenuous
at best. In the context of a corporate culture that seems resistant
to change and a political process that is virtually moribund,
traditional notions about the poor deserving their fate help many
marginalized workers feel better about themselves and their fate.

They also feed a politics that focuses on the welfare poor as the
cause of high taxes and social decay. Such a politics, often closely
intertwined with racist sentiments, blocks the kind of broad
coalitions needed to redress corporate economic and political
power.

Not surprisingly, the United States is thus one of the few nations
in the world in which the problems of the "poor" are separated out
from the problems of all working people. One indication of this is
that all industrialized nations of the world but the United States
provide basic income support (referred to as "child allowances" or
"family allowances") to families regardless of income. Although
modest in scale (for example, ranging in Europe from about $1,200 per
child in the United Kingdom to closer to $2,000 in France and
Sweden), such government support ensures some basic protection for
children from poverty by providing a guaranteed minimum income (plus
"social assistance" for those who are still poor!). In the United
States, where mainstream politicians and the culture sanctifies and
sentimentalizes the "family" and children, we do almost nothing to
ensure income support. A battle to implement child allowances in the
United States could potentially rally different divided
constituencies all of whom claim the mantle of serving children. (It
should be noted, incidentally, for those concerned about population,
that studies show no significant increase in the birth rate by
providing child allowances in Europe and elsewhere.)

In the long run, helping the poor involves the related challenges
of questioning stereotypes about the poor and finding programs that
address the insecurities of many working and middle class Americans.
Programs that would assist all working Americans rather than provide
special tax breaks to the corporations that helped create and sustain
these conditions are the way to go. Federal aid for the construction
and repair of our decaying public schools -- a need estimated by the
GAO to be over $100 billion -- would help many American communities
while especially benefiting the poorest communities. More adequate
urban, suburban, and rural public transit would ease air quality and
congestion problems affecting almost everyone and give many inner
city and rural residents better access to good jobs.

The corporations that profit from the public contracts to provide
such goods and services should be required to pay a living wage,
provide health benefits, and offer their workers adequate
opportunities for further training and on -the-job advancement. Such
requirements would not only foster significant consumer demand in
poor communities but also encourage a leveling up of corporate
practices.

The Rutgers study's information about attitudes toward work points
to another promising avenue. Gradual reductions in the standard work
week, not part of our politics since the late '30s, would both take
pressure off overworked Americans at the same time as it would offer
more job opportunities to the marginally employed. A higher minimum
wage, indexed to inflation, would help the poor in ways consonant
with our values and improve the bargaining power of most low income
workers.

That we cannot afford better schools and transit systems, a
shorter work week, an adequate minimum wage, and child allowance
programs is belied by the many ways in which such programs would
improve the productivity of our workers and ease the waste that
characterizes so much of our political economy.

If the politics of poverty is ever to be more than a photo op, it
must become the stuff of broad coalitions for reform of our corporate
political economy. Developing a program of adequate prerequisites for
a minimal quality of life would help and be helped by a reexamination
of our stereotypes regarding the poor.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine and writes on labor
and environmental issues. His most recent book (co-authored with Etta
Kralovec), The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts
Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, will
be published by Beacon Press in August. David Wagner is Professor of
Sociology and Social Work at the University of Southern Maine. His
latest book, What's Love Got to Do With It? A Critical Look
at American Charity, will be published by the New Press in
January.